(As an aside, I also love the quote in the article where EMC Corp. vice president of technology alliances Chuck Hollis pointed out that "To be honest, we're not seeing a whole lot of high performance stuff being put on VMware." Don't be fooled, most large datacenters will always have applications that can not be virtualized without a penalty.)

I would have to say that EMC's observation aligns with my own, as it has been clear for some time that NAS has offered some advantages over SAN for application storage in Cassatt environments. It boils down to accessibility--SAN requires special interface cards, and very few (if any) of the SAN switches today are remotely configurable by an automation environment. There are cool vendors out there (see 3PAR and DataCore, for example) that have tools to increase the dynamic nature of SANs, but NAS tends to rule here.

The article also notes some reasons why performance is overrated in the SAN vs. NAS comparison. Low end (e.g. workgroup class) NASs may suffer from some limitations based on network bandwidth, but TOE NICs and multi-NIC high-end NAS configurations are "widening the highway", allowing NAS performance to catch up to, and even surpass SAN. Cost/performance numbers are still something to consider, but I expect that the only apps that will be using fiber SAN in five years will be extremely high I/O applications, such as OLTP apps.

Let me give you quick reason why all of this is important: multitenancy. The Software as a Service (SaaS) and Managed Hosting Provider spaces have embraced the concept of one infrastructure supporting a large number of unique, individual clients. However, to achieve this, one needs to be able to "virtually" isolate each client from each other for both security and data integrity reasons.

To achieve this isolation, it is necessary to uniquely assign each customer two things: network access and (you guessed it) storage. Managed hosting providers and SaaS vendors are looking for tools that will allow them to dynamically assign a server (and thus, its hosted software) to specific VLANs and LUNs/namespaces. This will be a key focus for automation vendors in the next 2 years or so.

What do you think? How do you plan to address storage in your automated data center?

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About Me

James Urquhart is a widely experienced enterprise software field technologist. James started his career programming a manufacturing job tracking system on the Macintosh (circa 1991), and slowly expanded his experience to include distributed systems architectures, online community and identity systems, and most recently utility computing and cloud computing architectures. He has held positions in pre and post sales services, software engineering, product marketing, and program management for the online developer communities of one of the largest developer sites in the world. His admittedly schizophrenic background is driven by a desire to work with technologies that are disruptive, but that simplify computing overall.

James is also an avid blogger. His primary blog, recently renamed "The Wisdom of Clouds" (http://blog.jamesurquhart.com), is focused on utility computing, cloud computing and their effect in enteprises and individuals.

In addition to his online work, James is the father of two children: a son, Owen; and a daughter, Emery; and the husband of the perfect friend and wife, Mia. James lives in Alameda, CA, plays rock and bluegrass guitar.